Self-Consciousness by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary, Fiction, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, American, Authors; American, Novelists; American
ISBN: 9780449218211
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1989-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

131

S E L F - C O N S C I O U S N E S S

My father-in-law, a Unitarian minister, had been raised as a Quaker. I loved hearing him "thee" and "thou," without self-consciousness, in his gentle Midwestern voice, his wife and two daughters. By marrying his elder daughter, I had become an honorary Unitarian, and the Unitarians that I came to know were, every one of them, charming—lively, gracious, intelligent, and twinkly. They lived in big wooden houses on the tree-lined side streets of Cambridge, or in lovingly reclaimed old farmhouses up Vermont roads, or in solid brick establish-ments in the academic enclave of Chicago's Hyde Park, within a wary walk of the Meadville Seminary—my wife thrilled me by describing how she used to walk the dog with a knife in her stocking, in case the nearby black ghetto produced an assailant.

Unitarians were at first as exotic to me as Bantus. Though the denomination claimed the Spanish physician, theologian, and martyr Michael Servetus (1511-53) as a kind of founder, the American church dated from the second quarter of the last century, and its living members still breathed the spirit and quoted the words of Emerson, Channing, and Parker. I could not understand why anyone would build and attend churches without believing in the divinity of Christ or the actuality of God, in miracles or sacraments or immortality, but the churches were there, and handsome large structures they were, full of fine choir music, lofty prayers, and learned sermons.

Though my gentle father-in-law and I had some tense early arguments, in which I, blushing and stammering, insisted that an object of faith must have some concrete attributes, and he suggested that our human need for transcendence should be met with minimal embarrassments to reason, at bottom I loved him, and Unitarianism, too; it lacked that greasy heaviness of Lutheranism, the gloom of its linoleum-floored Sunday-school basements and the sickly milky tints of its stained-glass windows, the thick yellow sheen of its varnished pews and altar 132

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.